Occupational diversity

Introduction

Downstairs two plumbers are busy replacing my central heating boiler. Their names are Barry and Jerry. For me it is quite an unusual experience to deal with suppliers of English heritage. My hair is cut by a Greek Cypriot. It’s a Greek Cypriot who services my car and a Tamil who operates the petrol station where I refuel it. A South African looks after my teeth. I rely on an Armenian to dry-clean my clothes, on a Georgian to repair them and on a Kyrgistani to hand-make clothes for my German grandson. Cleaners are Bulgarian. South Asians serve at my local post office. The stationery and hardware store is run by a Punjabi Muslim family. A Turkish Kurd runs the store that delivers my daily paper. On a warm day the van from which I buy an ice cream at the entrance to Hampstead Heath is owned by an Italian.

In my street refuse collection and scaffolding are two occupations which remain stubbornly white. Parking regulations are enforced by men with black faces and care workers are mostly black. It is by women who I believe have West Indian voices that my calls to Camden Council are answered.

Few would deny that my experience confirms the key role of the BAME population in providing services to London residents and indeed the level of entrepreneurship that is so praiseworthy among so many of its minority communities. More contentious is my third proposition: that members of different minority communities specialise disproportionately in particular industrial sectors.

Clearly it is inappropriate to extrapolate solely on the basis of a single person’s experience, especially as that person approaches anecdotage, so let’s place my personal experience in the context of a more substantial body of evidence. This is a database, accessed via Companies House in 2005, which records the names of all UK company directors and the principal activity area of the companies of which they are a director. Origins was used to infer the heritage of each director based on their names.

The map shows the types of business that migrants from various parts of the world are disproportionately likely to run when they or their descendants live in Britain. Clearly not every British entrepreneur of Hindu Indian heritage runs a post office but such a large proportion do that we can mark “Post Offices” against northern India. Running post offices is not the favoured activity of all Britons of Indian heritage. For reasons that even they do not know, members of Britain’s Tamil community are particularly disposed to run or work in petrol stations whilst Sikhs are disproportionately engaged in transport, both to a greater extent than Indians with Hindu names.

On seeing this map a Chinese student immediately commented on the historic legacy of the silk route. This, she believed, explained the current engagement of North Indians, Iranians, Armenians and Turks in wholesaling and in trade in textiles. By a similar logic it is understandable why Greeks should be so well represented in shipping and peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean in various forms of hospitality, restaurants and hotels. Just as Italians have diversified from restaurants to the running of hotels, people with Irish names have moved from groundworks and construction into plant hire and equipment leasing.

Any explanation of the strong presence of both Filipinos and West Africans in the provision of care homes and social care and of West Indians and Afro-Caribbeans in security services is likely to rely on the attribution of personality characteristics which many people would hotly dispute. Let’s not go there for the moment.

Specialisation occurs not just at the level of industrial sector but also at the level of job function. This table shows the degree to which staff with surnames from different regions of the world specialise in different functions within a leading London hospital. Whereas over 40% of employees with Hispanic or African names work in the nursing and midwifery departments, the figures for people of South Asian, Greek or Cypriot heritage are between 10 and 15%.

Even within as narrow a specialisation as a university Geography department we find academic from different cultures choosing to specialise in different fields.

At the Annual Conference of the American Association of Geographers, attendees with Chinese surnames comprised four times the audience share during sessions on Cyberstructure and on Spatial Analysis and Modelling (20%) than they did for sessions on Social Theory, Cultural and Political Ecology and on Sexuality (5%).

Implications

1. At the level of directorship and ownership, members of different communities are in a position to exercise choice regarding the sector that they work in even if for employees there is less choice.
2. Family structure is an important constraint. The extended family structure typical of Muslim and Asian communities makes it easier for them to operate in some business sectors than is the case for communities such as the Irish, West Indians and Chinese, with less of a traditional of family business.
3. Language – fluency in English may make it easier to work as employees in large organisations. Poor command of English may encourage ambitious members of the community to create their own business.
4. Note the extent to which some communities favour working in public sector organisations because they will be treated more fairly whilst others favour working in commercial organisation for precisely the same reason.
5. Trading connections with the “home” country may influence the choice of occupation for some members of some minorities.